Good evening. Sorry to disturb you at this ungodly hour, but I bring you one bitter old man, one drunk on a day trip and a solicitor to relieve you of forty thousand quid. This was what was going through his mind as they approached the only source of light, two stripes of it escaping round a curtain behind a long glass pane.
‘No door handle!’ said Dave, swaying, gassy with lager fizz.
‘It’s called a window,’ said Nick, standing back on the gravel.
‘A French window,’ Dave said in his defence. He trod next along a flower bed, the wrong side of a box hedge, and found another door. ‘Bell don’t work.’
But Nick was already at the arched door with the wrought-iron knocker, tapping.
When the door opened, there escaped the smell of curry and onions and in the fumes and light appeared a great stocky woman in socks, shorts and a bandanna and T-shirt.
‘Isss Rambo,’ Dave whispered to him.
Her face and hands were daubed with what appeared to be dry clay. She folded her arms over her breasts. She stood there, feet planted wide, and with a roll-up in the side of her mouth she said, ‘Yih?’
‘Hi,’ said Nick, fawningly. ‘Hi, I . . .’ and he was about to make a great rhetorical circumnavigation of the matter of money featuring enquiries after their health and the children’s and coming to that of June’s, but he was forestalled. Melinda saw Ken, standing back in the half-shadow behind Nick, his eyes bright with aggression.
‘Oh it’s you. Kin.’ said Melinda, unimpressed. She took a drag and let the smoke out the same way it came in, through a crack in the side of her mouth. ‘She won’t go back to you, you know.’
‘Steady . . .’ said Dave, behind his father like a boxing trainer, on the balls of his feet. ‘Steady.’
‘JUNE!’ His father bellowed. ’JUNE! YOU IN THERE?’ Melinda raised an eyebrow. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bold. ‘I told her you’d only married her for her money.’
‘JUNE? IT’S ME! KEN!’
‘I think she might have got that one, Dad,’ said Dave, stuffing the tips of his fingers in his hoody pouch. He bent slightly at the waist. ‘All right, Melinda.’
‘All right, Dave.’ Melinda was leaning against the door, leisurely. ‘She can’t hear you, Kin.’
‘Course she can ’ear me. JUNE! IT’S ME! KEN!’ Melinda’s smile loosened her mouth’s grip on the damp roll-
up and its light died. Her pupils were large and, with her hair tied back and her brows and hair all of a uniform pale red, she was a very open-looking woman.
‘You got a nerve, haven’t you?’ she said to Ken, with amusement rather than contempt. ‘And you must be the older son,’ she added, looking at Nick, a note of scorn in her voice. ‘Well, well, well. It looks like a real family.’
Her lines were working out well for her, Nick thought, bitterly, recognizing in himself the humble desire to be liked above all else.
‘Melinda,’ he tried. ‘I think we might do well to all sit down together and have some sort of discussion, maybe hear June’s point of view?’
‘JUNE! WILL YOU GET YOUR BLEEDING FAT ARSE OUT ’ERE!’ Ken cupped his mouth.
‘He was never what you call a great motivator,’ said Dave, rubbing his hands. ‘Witches out ’ere love; do you mind if we come in?’
‘Why not?’ said Melinda, closing her finger and thumb on her roll-up and slipping it into the pocket of her cut-off jeans.
‘I reckon I can handle you three all right. Come on then.’
Ken made a doorway lunge at her – he seemed to have a thing for threshold confessions, Nick noted. ‘Listen, we don’t want no trouble, we ain’t come for that. I’ve always had respect for you and Andrew and been generous with you, a’n’ I? You can’t fault me for that. Is he home? Andrew?’ He cringed.
Oh, what a coward, thought Nick, after all that pre-combat steel in the car; his father had taken off his trilby and was squeezing it with both hands.
‘Just want to sort it out peaceful an’ all.’
‘All right,’ she said easily. She showed them to the round table in the middle of the kitchen, and they stood around it but did not sit.
‘Why won’t she come down?’ their father said, looking at Melinda with sentimental eyes. Perhaps it had occurred to him that someone did not like him. It seemed to defeat him momentarily. However, anger came smartly to his solace as soon as he remembered she was wrong and he was right. ‘Sod ’er then! Now she can’t bear to clap eyes on me? Do me a favour! She leaves me on a Frid’y for a start and just buggers off without so much as a word. She could have been dead on the road! I wasn’t to know, was I? She could have had a terrible accident, couldn’t she? Been in some ’ospital somewhere, all smashed up, and I wouldn’t have known. I mean, that ain’t right, is it? To treat another youman bein’ like that.’
‘Hell, I don’t care what you are, Ken – human might be an overstatement – but look, she’s happy here. You know? She’s starting to get her head round the idea that women are not slaves.’ She leant back against a counter and, taking a tea towel, began to wipe the clay off her hands.
‘Ah, come on, Melinda.’ Dave stepped forward. ‘Be fair. I mean, you’ve only heard her side of things.’
‘I’m not inclined to be fair, Dave. I believe a woman should be treated like a queen. Have you heard of a succubus?’
Dave and Nick exchanged looks. ‘We got the car outside,’ said Dave.
‘Well, watch out, the lot of you, is all I’ll say.’ She picked up an open bottle of beer from the counter and took a swig. ‘A pack of chauvinists on a day trip. Wonderful.’
Dave licked his dry lips.
Ken carried on, alternating reasonable appeal with furious glances up the stairs. ‘Look, if it’s to be goodbye between us, me and the Queen of Sheba, I’ll abide by her decision, course I will, but can’t she least come and tell me ’erself ?’
‘Maybe she’s feeling guilty about nicking the cash,’ said Dave.
‘She can’t look me in the face for what she’s done to me. She’s ’iding from me. Well she can ’ide from me but she can’t ’ide from the Big Man.’
‘She’s playing bingo on line, actually, Kin. She got ten pounds free when she set up her account and since then she’s been playing it round the clock. She’s three hundred quid up. Bless her.’
‘Gordon Bennett, don’t she know the bank always wins? She’ll blow all the money that way! She’ll go through it like a dose of salts. Look sharp, Melinda, and go and get her to come down, please. We ain’t driven all the way from Hastings to stand about
’ere while she plays bingo.’
‘All right. Now look. She didn’t want me to tell you this, but I told her I would do if you showed your face.’ She went and closed the top of a stable door and shut out the sounds of The Simpsons theme tune. ‘She’s not been eating since she got here. Andy and I are pretty clear that she’s starving herself to death, because of you. So, you have your little chat. But whatever you do, bear in mind her health. She’s not as strong as she looks.’
And with that, Melinda took to the stairs, trudging up and calling out to June that it was ‘just’ her.
‘Kin, she calls me. Kin. Funny old accent, ain’t she? Kin. Like as in kith and kin. Like as in family.’
‘That’s not what she means, Dad.’ Dave picked up an olive from a dish on the counter and popped it in his mouth. Then he picked up a carton and read it. ‘Soya milk.’
Nick folded his arms over his chest and looked serious. ‘We should all sit at that table when she comes down.’
Dave scanned the steel-lidded glass jars on the shelf next to him. There was a long row of them rather like an old-fashioned chemist’s. ‘Lentils. Sago. Quinoa . . . what’s that then? Quinoa, acai berries, bulgur wheat . . . Vegetarians! They’re bleedin’ vegetarians, Dad. Take a look in the fridge, Nick.’
‘No.’
‘Go on. See if there’s any bacon.’
Nick pulled on the door. The fridge was a laboratory, stacked with plastic containers, its uniformity floodlit. There were three huge round tubs on the middle shelf marked ‘live yoghurt’ and
‘quark’ and ‘tofu’. Dave came over, barging into the round table in his eagerness. He pushed Nick aside and bent to look inside it, using his sober eye. ‘Not a sausage.’
‘June can’t tolerate vegetables too well.’ Ken spoke out of the side of his mouth. ‘Sometimes one’ll slip through, and she’ll swell up with the wind in her sails. She’ll say, ’Ere, Ken, there must have been something funny in that lasagne. And I’ll say, What? Like a tamada? See, her constitution just can’t handle
’em. None of ’em. No chance. Give her a bit of cauliflower cheese and it’s who let Tommy out of prison.’ On hearing the women at the top of the stairs, he dropped his voice to a whisper and said with heavy sarcasm, ‘Look sharp, she’s coming down now. The Queen of Sheba herself. Watch out.’